Callous nature

THE title is a quotation from Charles Darwin. In a letter to a friend, he wrote, “What a book a Devil’s Chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low and horridly cruel works of nature.” At the beginning of his book Dawkins points out that nature is not cruel nor kind, but indifferent. He uses the word “callous” to describe it. These are terms that have a human content and this has led critics of Darwinism to lay horrors such as the Holocaust at its door. Dawkins …